Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll has her eye on RED STATE BLUE STATE:

Since the advent of color television, election-night coverage has featured two separate colors for states on the electoral map. But the color scheme had not solidified until the 2000 election. In fact, Wikipedia says that as late as 1980, the networks were still using Blue for Republicans such that David Brinkley opined that the 44-state landslide for Reagan made the map “resemble a suburban swimming pool.”

In 2000 the current Red and Blue scheme caught hold and stuck. It is easy to imagine that there must have been quite the heated discussions at the networks. Because at the time there was still widespread anti-communist sentiment. Certainly the Democrats didn’t want to be saddled with being called Reds, despite Warren Beatty’s rather gauzy, sentimental portrait of life in the Soviet Union in a movie by that name.

Well, now that the Democrats have let the cat out of the cellophane bag on their real socialist agenda, can’t we call the states that go for them Red States again? They are dang proud of it. Their pale codger candidates are vying for who can shred the most Amendments, who can punish the successful the harshest, who can promise the most freebies, grab the most guns, hate the military and LEOs the fiercest while releasing the most criminals. Oh, and if you like your deodorant, better stock up on it. But mostly Hill and Bern are all about who can recycle the most thoroughly-discredited political ideas.

Openly advocating socialism – except as a quaint aberration like Debs – is new. Also recent in our history is the obsession with what divides us rather than what unites us as Americans.

Kids when I grew up were proud to live in a “melting pot.” E pluribus Unum and all that. From many, one. A simple saying acknowledging “the many,” while not implying the slightest denigration of the many. It spoke of a synthesis, a unity, something greater than the sum of its parts. As a child, I imagined that pot filled not with food, which doesn’t actually melt, but with various metal bars melting into one alloy, stronger, more resilient and better than any single metal.

Hiss! Boo! Racist Heresy! Almost as bad as “All lives matter!” And lo, “one” became the “loneliest number” and Diversity-Worship was born.

The melting pot, so yesterday, meant that we were all just one undifferentiated mush, doncha know. I don’t know a single person who thought of himself that way, do you? New metaphors arose to explain the wonders of Diversity. Here are just two I heard constantly:

See, we’re not just a pot where we all blend into one. We’re a Beautiful Quilt, with dozens and dozens of different squares of cloth, vibrant and unique. Uh-huh.

This from people who have never MADE a flippin’ quilt. I have. A bunch of squares sewn together ISN’T a quilt. Yet. It’s just one layer. A quilt has a single piece of backing, a warm inner layer, and many, many ties to hold all three layers in place and make it into a quilt. Your metaphor dies a-bornin’. Because the “backing” in this instance is the the Declaration, the Constitution, our history, our commonality and the ties are the dozens of cultural bonds, not the mostly-superficial differences so beloved of the grievance-mongers like the color or shape of our skin.

OK, epic fail on metaphor. Try again. Let’s go with the ever-popular Salad Bowl. Instead of melted mush in a big pot, behold the beauty of a salad! It has many colorful vegetables and maybe some cranky onion rings, and in a fancy restaurant, maybe even some nuts and sprouts. Again, it’s not really a salad yet. It’s a bowl of wet vegetables. What makes it a “salad” is the base of some kind of greens, and then the all-important dressing, the thing that pulls it all together. Man, we’re still stuck with that whole unifying thing again.

Besides, as the t-shirt says, “No good story ever began with ‘So, I was eating a salad’…”

Since most Diversity Drones can’t do anything else useful, it’s hardly surprising that they can neither sew nor cook. The only math they can do is to religiously count how many black people, how many Hispanics, how many gays and transgenders, how many women are on board any enterprise (except the NBA, of course).

Naturally, some people are more diverse than others. Jews, East Indians, Asians (always all lumped together by these sensitive bean-counters, never mind profound differences between Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Hmong, Chinese, and Filipinos), all straight white men, and Conservative women of any color don’t count for spit. I have mentioned before that I was once called to see if I could perform at a Diversity Conference in Minneapolis that was being held on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. They didn’t even have the good grace to be embarrassed or apologetic.

What say we take back Blue and make the electoral map into another swimming pool? And begin the Long Slow March back to e pluribus unum.